Some
of you will have heard the story about Mr Abercrombie but it is worth hearing
again to help us understand what Paul is getting at in the passage we are looking
at together in Romans this morning. Mr Abercrombie was a respectable pillar
in the local community. If you needed any help, Mr Abercrombie was your man.
He was also a highly successful business executive and an active member of
his local church. Why, he was so keen that each week he a hosted a lunchtime
Bible study in his office. Then came the day he invited a speaker who would
normally be found in prison. Not serving a jail sentence, although he had done
that, but in that he spent most of working life speaking to prison inmates
about the Christian faith. But this day was different for he was addressing
19 businessmen elegantly dressed in their blue pinstriped suits and white shirts.
And so the speaker began his talk. It was about half way through that he said
something which caused several of the dignified gentlemen to pull a face as
if a skunk had just sneaked into the room. What he did was to refer to our
‘sinful nature’- the actual phrase he used was our ‘total
depravity’, the belief that every part of us is morally twisted- mind,
body and soul. Believe in the tooth fairy, believe in UFO’s, believe
in Father Christmas if you like-but believe that we are morally corrupt? No,
that was too much to take and one of the businessmen said so. ‘You don’t
really believe that we are sinners do you?’ he blustered. ‘I mean
you are far too sophisticated to be one of those hellfire and brimstone fellows,
intelligent people don’t go in for that kind of stuff.’ And this
is how the speaker replied, ‘Well, yes sir, I really do believe that
we are desperately sinful. What’s inside of each of us is really pretty
ugly. In fact we deserve hell and we would get it, but for the sacrifice of
Christ for our sins.’ Then Mr Abercrombie chimed up: ‘Well, I don’t
know about that,’ he said. ‘I’m a good person and have been
all my life. I go to church and I get exhausted spending all my time doing
good works.’ The room went so quiet you could hear a pin drop as twenty
pair of eyes burned into the speaker. He said, ‘Mr Abercrombie, if you
believe that- and I hate to say this, for you will certainly not invite me
back again-you are for all your good works, further away from the kingdom of
God than the people I work with in prison who are aware of their own sins.’

And
you can well imagine Mr Abercrombie thinking: ‘Well, what’s the
point then, why be good or religious at all?’ And as we have been listening
to Paul over the last few weeks we may be tempted to think pretty much the
same thing. In chapter 1 Paul confronted the pleasure seeking hedonist of the
‘eat drink and be merry for tomorrow we diet’ variety. Every conceivable
vice is listed and a nauseating list it is too. But somewhere between the escort
service and the church service is another group- the upright moralist. They
have been listening to Paul’s sermon as he has spoken about God’s
irrepressible anger and opposition to all that degrades and demeans the human
soul. And they have applauded him, ‘Preach brother preach’, they
have said-‘Go on Paul you tell them. That’s what we need a bit
of fire and brimstone, a keep Britain morally tidy campaign- you go for it.’
And he sees them in the congregation sitting in the most comfortable seats,
full of moral indignation, and he pauses and turns to them in chapter 2 and
says ‘You who pass judgement on others don’t you realise you are
at the same time passing judgement on yourself. If you are a good pagan you
fail to live up to your own standards because your conscience condemns you
and if you are a good Jew- a religious person, your very own Scriptures condemns
you.’ No, whichever way we turn we seem to be stuffed- guilty as charged

So
is there no advantage in having a religious upbringing? Well, of course there
is, says Paul, but not quite in the way you imagine. Because what it cannot
do is defeat the beast within, called sin. So let us turn to Romans 3 and see
how Paul deals with some tough objections until we get to the point where there
is only one hope and it is not to be found within us, but comes from outside
us in the most wonderful way imaginable.

First, the advantage of
revelation vv 1-8

Look at verse 1, ‘What advantage, then, is
there in being a Jew, or what value is there in circumcision? Much in every
way! First of all, the Jews have been entrusted with the very words of God.’
Dogs do not know they have a Creator, and neither do daisies! The heavens may
declare the glory of God, according to the psalmist, but they don’t do
so consciously- only human beings (as well as angels) can do that. So humans
are endowed with this wonderful capacity to think and reflect and relate- and
in principle, to think about their Maker. But the Jews were in a category all
of their own for God had revealed himself to them especially- speaking to them
personally as with Abraham; giving his law to Moses and then speaking countless
times in countless ways through countless prophets. Think of that- the God
of heaven choosing you to speak to personally! That is some advantage over
every other human being living on the planet! Similarly today, it is a tremendous
blessing to be brought up in a Christian home or attend a Christian school
or enjoy the freedoms provided by what historically has been a Christian country.

But
it is what you do with those privileges that matter-acting upon them rather
than presuming upon them. Sometimes people will say to me, ‘But what
of those who have never heard the Gospel?’ And I have to say that is
not my primary concern, I am more worried about those who have heard or at
least have the opportunity to hear the Gospel and yet do nothing about it.
There are 20,000 people in our parish, everyone one within walking distance
of this church and here we are this morning a mere handful in comparison. The
advantages people have in this country in having access to the Gospel and enjoying
a culture which is the fruit of the Gospel are immense- and yet for all of
that the turning away from God sadly continues. Whatever advantages God gives
us are to be grasped, if they are not it is simply further evidence of our
innate rebelliousness against him.

Now it might be helpful to look
at the next few verses as a kind of Q and A session (Questions by an imaginary
objector and answers by Paul).
Having shown there is an advantage in
biblical religion, the first question is then:

Q- v 3a ‘Surely
that revelation failed, because not everyone believed it?
A -‘Despite
people’s failure to believe, God is still faithful in reaching out to
us, he can’t be blame for trying to befriend humanity. Even King David
saw this after he had committed adultery with Bathsheba and effectively murdered
her husband. God had been so kind to David and yet he treated God shabbily
and so he knew he couldn’t say anything in his defence’- hence
the quote from Psalm 51 in verse 4.
Next Q, ‘If unrighteousness
is necessary for God’s righteousness to be seen, how fair is it for him
to judge us? V5
A-v6‘On that basis God couldn’t judge anybody
and everyone agrees that God should judge –that is part and parcel of
what it means to be God.
Final Q,v7 ‘Well, if sinning makes God
look better in showing up his righteousness in judgement and mercy in forgiveness,
should we not sin all the more so God will be glorified all the more?
A-v8
‘I know some people accuse us of saying that but it is ridiculous and
reveals a poor understanding of the personal nature of grace, what you have
said is like the teenager leaving his room like a tip just to show his friends
what a great Mum he has in her willingly cleaning it up for him!’

So
again the message is that formality without inner reality thinks of a relationship
with God in mechanical, impersonal ways. If you love someone, then you don’t
do things which will upset them.

And so having dealt with what
might be well intended but misplaced objections, Paul gets back to our real
problem which the moralist would seek to deny and the religious would attempt
to avoid – our sin. And so we come to the anatomy of sin vv 9-18.

Look
at verse 9, ‘What shall we conclude then? Do we have any advantage? Not
at all! For we have already made the charge that Jews and Gentiles alike are
all under the power of sin.’ Paul is not contradicting himself. Yes,
there are advantages in biblical religion- God is known, his laws are given,
his kindness displayed and so much more, but when it comes to the thing which
plagues us, then the most religious person in the world is in the same position
as the most non-religious person in that he like the rest of us is infected
by the disease called sin- and neither having a Bible on your shelf or a lucky
charm in your pocket makes a blind bit of difference. As the Christian writer,
G.K. Chesterton once said, ‘We are all in the same boat and we are all
seasick’.

What separates us from God is sin. We are not strong
enough to remove it and not good enough to erase it. Whether you are a pauper
or a pope, a barman or a bishop- the same virulent moral disease is coursing
through your veins, leading your further away from God and nearer to your own
destruction. We are all ‘under sin’, (the word ‘power’
is not in the original) v 9 and all are ‘unrighteous’-v10- both
amount to the same thing. To be unrighteous speaks of our position before God,
to be under sin speaks of our citizenship, we have a spiritual passport which
declares we belong to a rebellious race.

Think of it like this. Fred
is an excellent sailor- the best. He can shin up the rigging like a monkey
on Red Bull. He can swab the decks with the best of them. He can navigate simply
by the stars. Fred would win the sailor of the year award every time. But then
you discover that Fred sails under the Jolly Roger- he is a pirate. It is not
how good we are at doing what we do that counts, but under whose flag we sail,
who is our Sovereign? And Paul has been showing that we are all in effect pirates,
rebels against our kind, patient, sovereign God and it doesn’t get any
more serious than that. Or does it? The imagery Paul is about to use by drawing
on raft of Old Testament passages to expose the human condition, borders on
the macabre, it really is like a scene from a horror movie. For it is an autopsy
of the spiritually diseased riddled body we all inhabit. So I hope you have
a strong stomach.

Paul takes us to the spiritual mortuary and shows
us three bodies which have been subject to the scalpel of the coroner to determine
cause of death. There is the hedonist, the moralist and the religionist. And
do you know what? As they lie side by side, there is no difference between
them at all- v 10, ‘There is no one righteous not even one’. Their
anatomy is identical- vv 14-18; ‘throats like open graves; deceitful
tongues; viper lips; mouths full of vulgarity; feet marching towards violence,
all because there is no fear of God before their eyes.’ Do you
see how the disease of sin is no respecter of persons and how our entire being
is infected, from the top of our head to the tips of our toes? Sin, you see,
subjecting us all to a slow death-as Paul will later say in chapter 6:23 ‘The
wages of sin is …death.’ And no amount of pleasure seeking, or
moral campaigning or religious ritual can do a thing about it.

In
fact what we have here in this catena of Old Testament texts is an insight
into what the speaker referred to with Mr Abercrombie, total depravity; that
is the Bible’s teaching that sin is like a corrupting spiritual virus
effecting the totality of our being. It effects our minds, v 11, ‘no
one understands’; our motives, v11,‘No one seeks God’; our
wills v12 ‘All have turned away’; our speech v13, ‘Their
tongues practise deceit, with lying lips and cursing mouths’ and our
relationships- with each other, v15 we are ‘swift to shed blood’,
and with God, v18, ‘there is no fear of God’. This is the Bible’s
summary of our sinful condition but also a pointer to the antidote.

And
so finally, the admission of defeat vv 19-20

‘Now we know that
whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law, so that every
mouth may be silenced and the whole world held accountable to God. Therefore
no one will be declared righteous in God’s sight by the works of the
law; rather, through the law we become conscious of our sin.’ What’s
that all about?

It is this: we saw that when Paul spoke of being
‘under sin’ it was a matter of our citizenship if you like. Well,
the Jew who is ‘under the law’ is a citizen of the law, under its
rule. But while God gave the law to the Jews in particular, it had a purpose
for the whole world in general, namely to silence the world and render it accountable
to God. You see, in a Jewish court of law, the way by which you signalled that
you had lost your case was by placing your hand over your mouth, ‘stopping
your mouth’, that is the picture here. So when we see that even the religious
man par excellance- the Jew, can’t be put right with God by having the
law, then we are all no hopers. If the best of the best are lost, where does
that leave the rest of us?-really lost! On the last day no one is going to
be able to accuse God of unfairness- that we never had an opportunity to seek
after him, that we didn’t know right from wrong, that he had favourites,
or pointing to others saying, ‘I wasn’t as bad as him’ as
if such a comparison will let us off the hook. If we have a Bible, that will
condemn us. If we haven’t, then our conscience will condemn us. God will
be seen to be just and we will have to agree. We are the problem, not God.

And
Paul tells us why the moral law is no help in saving us, but instead makes
matters worse for that through it we become ‘conscious of sin.’
Now Paul doesn’t mean that we come to know right from wrong by having
the law, but that knowing the law has a strange effect on us. You see when
the Law meets an unregenerate heart (that is, a person without the Holy Spirit
and without faith), the effect is that it reveals the rebellion in our hearts;
it brings it out. Sin rises up in the presence of the Law and shows itself
in its gaudy colours.

It's like a teenager who goes to the front
door when the post has arrived. He brings it in and puts it on the table. He
flips through it and sees that there isn’t anything for him, and so he
starts to walk away. No bad desires there. But then he notices at the top of
one of the postcards the words, "For parents only!" And suddenly
there is a desire to read the card, which he does. Are those words on the card
sin? No. But through those words come the knowledge of sin. Suddenly what was
lying dormant in the heart is shown to really be there - the desire to read
what one ought not to read. Do you see how it works? The law stirs up our inner
rebelliousness- it triggers sin.

Now in the next passage Paul is
going to show God’s answer-the only answer to our real need, how a new
power can be put into us by the Holy Spirit and how a new citizenship is given
to us by God’s Son.

And one person who discovered this for
himself was Mr Abercrombie. So let me tell you how the story ends. As Mr Abercrombie
led the speaker down the corridor, he took him to an empty office. As soon
as they were inside he said ‘I don’t have what you have.’
‘I know’ replied the speaker, but you can.’ Within a few
moments both men were on their knees with Mr Abercrombie using the the C word
-Charity- asking for God’s free unmerited forgiveness and love in his
Son.

Now could I ask whether you have done that? Could I ask if you
are resting in that or even as a professing Christian you have lapsed back
into trying to prove yourself worthy of God? Nothing less will do to help us
get off the treadmill of religion and good works and all the burdensome guilt
it brings in its wake and instead enjoy the presence of God in Christ.

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